“Our age is the seculum of beautiful trifles, bagatelles or sublime chimeras.” - Kant (Remarks in the Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime) 1799
Workshop Two, ‘Knowledge Economy’ will be practically based with the
development of scenarios for staging events and working in the knowledge
economy. In workshop two you will be asked to develop a plan for using
digital tools and platforms in a planned event that you formulate. You
will be working in small groups throughout the session, and this will be
organized according to the feedback we received with your workshop
submissions.
The goals of the workshops are
* To increase your practical knowledge of digital media as tools and platforms in event management
* To develop a working scenario for your own project/s
* To develop a network for support and cooperation that lasts beyond the workshops
* To integrate digital media into your own professional activities.
1. Participation and publication: A binary of the digital knowledge economy
Push- individual motivation
Pull – institution and career
Training is now replaced by use (e.g. ‘lifelong education’). There is
no time to train and for this reason media must be integrated into
daily life: In relation to the digital proliferation, ‘Professional
Lifecasting’ is applicable to the situation created by social media
today, Lifecasting is “a continual broadcast of events in a person’s life through digital media. Typically, lifecasting is transmitted through the medium of the Internet and can involve wearable technology”
(Wikipedia). In Lifecasting, digital media, and particularly social
media, become the means of interacting with your surroundings and
experiences. The constant mediation that results from Lifecasting breaks
up participation into an almost reflective exercise. In an economy
where knowledge is produced and shared online, for academics tensions
emerge between the traditionally valued role of publication and the
totally necessary contemporary role of participation.
Of course the necessity of participation over the demands of
publication makes for a large range of issues, ruptures, contradictions,
conflicts and desires. These can be considered in relation to a few
points:
Performance is not measured by numbers online.
Your professional identity is mediated by non-professionals.
Everything is shared although it may not all be free (as in freedom not beer).
You need to know who your audience is.
You are an avatar.
Writing for the web is a basic element in negotiating the above five
points. If writing is now 1. A performance, that is 2. Mediated by
non-professionals and is 3. Shared, with an 4. Audience that is global
and 24/7 and 5. With you as the author a presence not only in the text
but in the comments, critique, and possible remix of it; what does it
mean for your work?
“What does it mean to be a digital worker today? The Internet has
become a simple-to-join, anyone-can-play system where the sites and
practices of work and play increasingly wield people as a resource for
economic amelioration by a handful of oligarchic owners. Social life on
the Internet has become the “standing reserve,” the site for creation of
value through ever more inscrutable channels of commercial
surveillance. This inquiry has important ramifications for struggles
around privacy, intellectual property rights, youth culture and media
literacy) Trebor Scholz, Why Does Digital Labor Matter Now?
(Introduction – Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory).
2. Tools for change: the digital components of professional life (branding, networks, readership)
Branding: How ‘what you do’ is related to ‘who you are’ in its
presentation to your audience. This is bound up in relevance; how is
what you do relevant to the people you are trying to communicate with.
Personal branding is not necessarily a totally planned and conscious
process. You are already doing most of what you are trying to present to
people. You don’t need to (and should not) tailor your activities based
on popularity or fame. But you need to package the presentation of your
work and ideas in a way that makes it identifiable in an ocean of
similar voices, images, texts and expressions. In this way design
becomes relevant to how you work online. Interactive design, which
according to Löwgren and Stolterman makes “ideas visible” (51) in “the
process that is arranged within existing resource constraints to create,
shape, and decide all use-orientated qualities (structural, functional,
ethical, and aesthetic) of a digital artifact for one or many clients”
(5). In considering your personal brand you should consider
“use-orientated qualities (structural, functional, ethical, and
aesthetic)” in the digital artifacts you are working with. In my own
work I believe this considering is a form of reading.
Löwgren, Jonas, and Erik Stolterman. Thoughtful Interaction Design: A Design Perspective on Information Technology. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004. Print.
The following are tools of personal branding:
Business card
General resume/cover letter/references document (Keep it online and public)
Networks: “Whereas in postmodernism, being was left in a
free-floating fabric of emotional intensities, in contemporary culture
the existence of the self is affirmed through the network” – Kazys
Varnelis http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2010-01-14-varnelis-en.html
How do you acknowledge your own present position in a network? You are
most likely part of several networks. Think about how you exercise or
activate your own network identities. Are there strengths and weaknesses
to these activates? Do you see any strategy, tendencies or patterns in
how you participate in networks? Think about digitally mediated networks
and how these are either part of your life or ways in which you would
like to make particular networks part of your life.
Readership is one way of describing an audience or public. Tracking
your public is of vital importance for the development and effectiveness
of you participation in the knowledge economy as an academic. If you
have websites and other content online outside the domain of your
institution you run the risk of being singled out in some way. You must
always remain conscious of this; keep sites up to date, monitor comments
and contributions, do not allow links to die or even worse,
descriptions of people and events to fall out of date. Living on the web
is not a nine to five occupation, as these two contrasting examples
illustrate from Facebook (the first in Swedish but translatable with
Google – although badly). First the Scandinavian supermarket chain Coop keeps control over a online protest about it stocking endangered Yellow Fin Tuna over a weekend,
despite it stating it will not sell endangered fish species in response
to a photo being posted on Coop’s Facebook site of the Yellow Fin for
sale. Secondly, retail giant H&M, which apologized for its delay in removing a Facebook posting that spiraled out of control with nasty and disparaging comments.
It took a month for H&M to address the violent and threatening
comments. Paying daily, (even hourly if something is active) attention
is important to keep your online project on track when dealing with
networked and social media. Other tracking tools are Foller.me, StatCounter and Extreme Tracking. Google is the best of these but your details are not your own and they are being shared
3. Working with digital tools creatively
The range of digital tools available for free, little cost or under
license is huge. There is little point starting your investigation from
the perspective of ‘finding the tools that can help me’. Rather, ask
yourself what it is you want to do? Why are you considering adopting
digital tools in your professional practice? Look to the examples of
others; particularly in the field your work yourself and of people whose
work you admire. Once again, building a network is extremely
worthwhile.
Tools can be broken up into broader categories:
Personal (email, website, creative, hobbies and pastimes, connections, avatars)
4. Researching in the digital knowledge economy
By following many of the other points in this presentation you will
get some idea of how it is to be a researcher in the digital knowledge
economy. However there is a further dimension to this; researching on
the digital knowledge economy. Many people work with digital subjects;
cataloging cultures, behaviors, symbols and languages, critiquing the
artistic products of the digital. Many of the tools I present here are
useful in this work. The methods are still being developed but there is a
lot of material already available from the work done so far. While it
is an area unto itself, I would be happy to talk about it more if people
are interested.
5. Working across media in the creative digital knowledge economy
The catch cry of so much work in the digital knowledge economy is
transdisciplinary or interdisciplinary. This is a fundamental of the
so-called Digital Humanities. I spoke at the first workshop about team
building and this is one approach to the problems created by projects
and work that unite different themes and methods under the banner of
mediation. The secondary area of this issue is the use of different
media in working in the digital knowledge economy. A number of points
need to be made in relation to working across media in the creative
digital knowledge economy.
a) Media should complement each other
b) Each medium has its own affordances
c) Specialize in one, but have a working knowledge of many
d) Use technical support whenever possible
“The smartest person in the room will no
longer be a person but the room!” - Adeline Koh
"Real-Time Event Collaborations Across Mixed and
Transmedial Realities" is made up of two half-day workshops coordinated by the Social Media Knowledge Exchange (SMKE)
being held at the Centre for
Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) at the
University of Cambridge.The
Twitter tag for the workshops is #SMKEreal Workshop 1 is 'Event Management' to be staged on 20 February
2013, Wednesday, 9am – 12 noon at CRASSH. A Prezi will be used to present a
lecture on the background to Event Management and
is available here. This blog entry provides extra
links, materials and case studies that cannot be
accommodated in the Prezi for Workshop I. Event Management. Consider the following the
readings for the workshop. 1. The boundaries of space in mediating
events; the virtual present and the presence virtual Space is not simply the room one is located in any
more. The presentation of seminars, speeches and lectures can include virtual
environments, streamed media, social media and augmented reality content. Organizing
these media takes time and consideration.
a) Virtual Worlds
A virtual world is a persistent three dimensional shared architectural space that is
populated by interactive agents that operate in synchronized real time communication
and interaction. Virtual worlds offer a wide variety of affordances for collaboration,
communication and expression in the context of academic events. A case study for the
use of virtual worlds as a totalizing platform for an event is the SLanguages conference. The SLanguages
Conference, in its first and original incarnation, was run by Gavin Dudeney as a
non-commercial, community-driven and supported event for language teachers from 2008 -
2010. Since 2010 it has been run by an international collective of teachers and
trainers (AVALON) and brings together
practitioners and researchers in the field of language education in Second Life for a
24-hour event to celebrate languages and cultures within the 3D virtual world.
Archiving content from virtual worlds is about the same as from the physical; recording
is important; video, audio and photo.
Barrister speaking on twitter: "As I'm sure your lordship is aware a hashtag allows
users to search for a particular topic." - Heather Brooke
Backchannel is the
practice of using networked computers to maintain a real-time online conversation
alongside the primary group activity or live spoken remarks. The term was coined in the
field of Linguistics to describe listeners' behaviours during verbal communication,
Victor
Yngve 1970.
First growing in popularity at technology conferences, backchannel is increasingly a
factor in education where WiFi connections and laptop computers allow students to use
ordinary chat like IRC or AIM to actively communicate during class. More recently,
researchers from Penn State University have explored bringing "backchannel" up front in
classrooms - "ClassCommons, " to increase students' participation and promote
community building.
Twitter is also widely used today by audiences to create backchannels at technology
conferences. When audience members add an event hashtag to their tweets (for example,
#w2e was the hashtag used for the Web 2.0 Expo New York in 2009 - however one should always be careful
of overly simple hashtags), anyone can run a Twitter search to review all the
backchannel tweets related to that event. Logging and archiving tweets is important
following an event, something I return to below in the Case Studies. This is one way of
keeping track of your subjects. Tagging is very important for maintaining coherency in
documentation of an event. c)
Streamed Content
Streaming content from
an event is literally live TV; it can be risky, but it
can be knife-edge
exciting too. The live event should be streamed over a
number of channels; a Twitter feed, a video stream,
possibly audio, and live updates for images. If you are
making an archive of the event from existing
platforms it tends to be distributed over the
various sites that support such media,or alternatively
you can build a
single site to link all
the materials together. Blogs are good for this, as are
some of the newer archiving sites for Twitter. A YouTube channel can be a way
of archiving videos. With permission from IP owners after an event, these can easily be ripped and reset, or linked to. Tagging
is a way of getting participants
to build an archive together. If you build your own archive, an attention to design is important. Simplicity
and elegance is the key, as anevent involving more than just 50 people can produce a lot of
material. Navigating is the necessity.
Speed of delivery and being able to refer back (i.e.
link directly to a video or blog post) is
vital.
d) Augmented reality The physical design of the classroom, seminar room, lecture room has changed little in the past 500+ years. However, the space of the room as a set of relations has
changed dramatically in the last 20
years.
The
physical space of teaching is now permeated by wireless signals that can be controlled
by the teacher. Internet, intranet and more even more local networking such as
Bluetooth and cloud applications such as Apple's Airdrop make it possible to link
devices. This digital layer can be blended with the physical space, or used to extend
it out into virtual environments. A classroom or event can have an equivalent site
in a virtual world such as Second Life. However one should be wary of attempting to
replicate over virtual and physical spaces: they should compliment each other. For this
to happen an awareness of a 'grammar of space' is
required.
"However, we believe that turning the active conversations of communities into aggregated data (and thus turning publics into passive audiences) strips these groups of their agency and rejects their capacity for participation." - Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Cultureby Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, Joshua Green
2. The ethics of crowd contributions, or, “Watch out, I am behind
you!”
In November 2009 social media researcher danah boyd
gave a presentation at the Web 2.0 Expo. The presentation "Streams of Content, Limited
Attention: The Flow of Information through Social Media" was back-dropped by a large
screen carrying a live Twitter feed:
It soon became apparent that the Twitter feed was
not with danah, she
describes it;
I only learned about the Twitter feed shortly before my talk. I
didn’t know whether or not it was filtered. I also didn’t get to see the
talks by the previous speakers so I didn’t know anything about what was going
up on the screen. When I walked out
on stage, I was also in for a new shock: the lights were painfully bright. The only
person I could see in the “audience” was James Duncan Davidson who was
taking photographs. Otherwise, it was complete white-out. Taken aback by this, my
talk started out rough.
Now, normally, I get into a flow with my talks after about 2
minutes. The first two minutes are usually painfully rushed and have no rhythm as I
work out my nerves, but then I start to flow. I’ve adjusted to this over the
years by giving myself 2 minutes of fluff text to begin with, content that sets the
stage but can be ignored. And then once I’m into a talk, I gel with the
audience. But this assumes one critical thing: that I can see the audience. I’m
used to audiences who are staring at their laptops, but I’m not used to being
completely blinded.
Well, I started out rough, but I was also totally off-kilter. And
then, within the first two minutes, I started hearing rumblings. And then laughter.
The sounds were completely irrelevant to what I was saying and I was devastated. I
immediately knew that I had lost the audience. Rather than getting into flow and
becoming an entertainer, I retreated into myself. I basically decided to read the
entire speech instead of deliver it. I counted for the time when I could get off
stage. I was reading aloud while thinking all sorts of terrible thoughts about myself
and my failures. I wasn’t even interested in my talk. All I wanted was to get
it over with. I didn’t know what was going on but I kept hearing sounds that
made it very clear that something was happening behind me that was the focus of
everyone’s attention. The more people rumbled, the worse my headspace got and
the worse my talk became. I fed on the response I got from the audience in the worst
possible way. Rather than the audience pushing me to become a better speaker, it was
pushing me to get worse. I hated the audience. I hated myself. I hated the situation.
I wanted off. And so I talked through my talk, finishing greater than 2 minutes ahead
of schedule because all I wanted was to be finished. And then I felt guilty so I made
shit up for a whole minute and left the stage with 1 minute to
spare.
A difficult situation. But one that offers reflection on how one should integrate real-time, shared social media into a live presentation. Positioning and the scale of screens should be considered carefully.
Notice in this image the presenter is not
overshadowed by the multiple screens. Granulation is applied here. Asking the
audience to move their attention between screens also engages them on a physical as
well as a mental level.
Presenter should be consulted well before the event.
That a presented is not involved in the design of the presentation is beyond all
consideration.
Tweetchat on livetweeting at conferences issues include the nature of academia, privacy
concerns, and intellectual property theft. For a extensive Tweetchat discussion on the
ethics of live tweeting, see this Storify archive: #Twittergate:
What are the ethics of Live Tweeting at Conferences?
Other issues from digital media documentation in live situations include the
distribution of video online by audience members after the event, with the possibility
of personal attack from trolls and opponents,
3. Designing an Event with Digital
Infrastructure
Consider the audience and if they are willing to step over into being participants. How
motivated are the presenters? Are the people taking part in event familiar with each
other already? Can you harness existing linkages between them? Have you got enough time
and motivation to work at building a community before the event? (I have tried this, it
depends on the nature of the event; regular cyclical conferences are much easier than
one off events, if the audience is somewhat homogenous, based on location, department,
or discipline in can be easier). How many people are we talking about? Were are they
physically distributed? What is the venue/s for the event?
The spaces you are going to be working with are important. One should first consider
the purpose of using digital infrastructure in relation to the event - is it to
increase dissemination? To create a document or record? Will their be a significant
improvement in the quality of the event if digital infrastructure tools are used?
Creating digital dimensions to an event DOES NOT SAVE TIME OR MONEY in and of itself!
It does create in and of itself! It does create artifacts and connections and spaces
and ideas. It can cut down on travel budgets, but it does not replace face-to-face
interaction. Digital mediation can change the dynamics of a space. The presenter is no
longer necessarily the center of the room. Topics can be multiple, synchronous and
asynchronous, a deeper more stratified record can be created as a result of networked
mediation at an event.
The duration of the event should be considered. After three days even the most
dedicated tweeter is exhausted. The longer the event the more data will be generated as
well. Material can be generated after the event and it can take considerable time for a
complete archive to be up and running. Once again the use of digital infrastructure
should be considered in light of the goals. The concept of the 'Long Tail' can be considered in relation
to timing for events:
"Now, in a new era of networked consumers and digital everything, the economics of such distribution are changing radically as the Internet absorbs each industry it touches, becoming store, theater, and broadcaster at a fraction of the traditional cost" (Anderson, The Long Tail p8).
While the physical event itself may only last two days, it can be
sustained in synchronous and asynchronous communication for weeks, even months. The
book 'Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution' by Howard Rhinegold spawned a group
website unexpectedly that has lasted more than a decade.
Media formats and 'reach' are the final points I would consider in setting up digital
infrastructure for an event. Most online social platforms are available to all with a
computer and a good Internet connection. Some virtual worlds can run heavy on CPUs and
have a steep learning curve (In my experience it takes about three months of almost
daily use for someone to be comfortable with socializing, communicating and inhabiting
a virtual space). The perceived gravitas of social media (or lack thereof) may be worth
considering if the topic of the event does not suit mass participation or sources or
material have to be protected (I was asked not to tweet details recently at a
presentation about undersea optic cables and web infrastructure - the presenter was
trying to maintain her sources in the military and homeland security sectors). Finally,
reach has to do with how far your event can be cast out from its location into space;
in terms of dimensions and number of people. Having a well run backend (servers,
websites, streaming channels, wireless, capacity for avatars on a virtual site etc) is
essential. Technical support that can work directly with the front end users and actors
(students, lecturers, theorists, researchers, performers etc.). Languages should also
be considers, being based in Sweden, so much of my work is conducted in English - (I wish it could be Mandarin and Arabic and Spanish as well).
One of the great advantages of using virtual worlds is the presence of translation
tools, such as these
in Second Life. Maybe reach is not important and the event is to be confined to a
specific group. This is then an important consideration, as once something is loose on
the web, it is nigh on impossible to shut it down.
Archiving the Event (tagging streaming storing collating)
Every archive has to have an entry point and be searchable. Just making those two
decisions is a major set of hurdles crossed. Most commercial sites on the web that host
content will offer a interface and some form of search; even if it is the Google motor
embedded into the frame. For the past decade I have been archiving my own material with
3 personal blogs, archive.org, the Free Music Archive, Soundcloud, Slideshare, Prezie,
Academia.edu, a national registry of academic publications in Sweden (DIVA), YouTube,
Flickr, Delicious, Scribd, LinkedIn and I now coordinate it all with a site called About.me. This is an archive of a
sorts; it contains an entry point, it is searchable, and much of the material in it is
tagged. Tagging is the key to managing material online.
The other important factor in building infrastructure for events is analytics. I use
Google Analytics to keep track of who my
audience is, what sort of attention I am getting online and why, where it is coming
from, and what opportunities does it present for me. Not all attention online is good,
if you have websites and other content online outside the domain of your institution
you run the risk of being singled out in some way. You must always remain conscious of
this; keep sites up to date, monitor comments and contributions, do not allow links to
die or even worse, descriptions of people and events to fall out of date. Living on the web is not a nine to five occupation, as these two contrasting examples illustrate from Facebook (the first in Swedish but translatable with Google - although badly). First the Scandinavian supermarket chain Coop keeps control over a online protest about it stocking endangered Yellow Fin Tuna over a weekend, despite it stating it will not sell endangered fish species. In response to a photo being posted on Coop's Facebook site of the Yellow Fin for sale. Secondly, retail giant H&M, which apologized for its delay in removing a Facebook posting that spiraled out of control with nasty and disparaging comments. It took a month for H&M to address the violent and threatening comments. Paying daily, (even hourly if something is active) attention is important to keep your online project on track when dealing with networked and social media. Other
tracking tools are Foller.me, StatCounter and Extreme Tracking. Google is the best of these but your
details are not your own and they are being shared 4.
Identifying practical digital tools for using in event management (20+
Tools)
Many More Digital Tools Available
Here
(Note: I distinguish tools from platforms. A
platform is a stand alone assemblage that can be used to create, project or mediate.
A tool makes, changes or alters something else by acting upon it. A tool has an object. A platform creates
subjects. Of course the two are not exclusive and the use of the tool, as
Heidegger argues, creates its
meaning and in turn results in subjectivities
for users).
Case Studies In presenting the following case studies
my intention was to share the format of each, but
also show something of my own development in using digital media and digital tools
and platforms in staging events, teaching
and keeping a record
of the documentation. I made mistakes all
along the way; learned things only after doing them.
It is always a process in the digital. What is
important is what you retain along the way. Do not be afraid to make mistakes, to
experiment and to occasionally make a fool of yourself. The famous design agency IDEO has a motto;
"Make mistakes early as it saves time later". Words to live
by.
The presentation of seminars, speeches and lectures in virtual environments is not
uncommon today. Many universities are investing in virtual worlds for teaching and
learning. But in attending many presentations I have as often been disappointed as
I have been inspired. Designing the seminar in the virtual space to ensure an
experience for the presenter and the audience that leaves them feeling rewarded,
rather than wondering why it was not just streamed over the net as a video, is not
simple. Recognizing the affordances of the particular virtual
world medium is a key element in designing the seminar around what it is that the
presenter wants to convey. From this link I recount some of the ideas and problems
that were met when a group of researchers, artists and technicians worked together
on presenting a single seminar in simultaneous physical and virtual space.
HUMlab hosted a two and a half day symposium
Media
Places 2012: Infrastructure Space Media. It was a pleasure to be part of
such a well organized and high standard colloquium in which some of the preeminent
critics, theorists and practitioners in the fields related to media in space/place
gathered. My role in the proceedings was to assist in documenting the exchanges,
ideas and perspectives that emerged during the symposium. Part of this
documentation was using Twitter. I tweeted as much as I could, but I was joined by
many in what I consider to be a successful back-channel discussion. After two and
half days I archived a total of 863 tweets tagged with #MediaPlaces2012 (I know
– a long tag, I have learned) on Storify, one set for each day:
A collaborative blog for
organizing and staging the Social Media Cultures project between Umeå
University (Sweden) and the University of Wollongong (Australia). The project is
based in HUMlab at Umeå University, a digital humanities computing lab and
studio. Social Media Cultures was a three-day collaborative
workshop between the University of Wollongong (Australia) and Umeå University
(Sweden) on social media in research and learning in September2011. Seven guests
researchers and teachers from University of Wollongong, as well as Deakin
University in Australia attended the workshop. The workshop was an open forum for
discussion around a number of themes related to social media. The goal of the
workshop was to develop further research and teaching collaborations by showcasing
the work going on in each university and finding common areas of expertize and
interest. Umeå University, the Faculty of Arts and the University of
Wollongong sponsored the workshop.
Image of a
student project in Second Life. Three dimensional space is used to connect images,
objects, text documents, audio and visual materials.
4. Second
Life films and exhibitions in HUMlab (Kulturanalys- och museologi
studenter) Culture Analysis and Museum Studies students in the Culture and
Media department presented their work in the form of films and exhibitions made in
Second Life, a persistent 3-D virtual online
world in which users interact with each other via their graphical representations, or
avatars. The significance of using Second Life is that the interaction in its world
enables the relatively easy constitution of representational forms, such as films and
gallery exhibits, which may be created by students and, in so doing, become learning
tools in themselves. Indeed, the point of the exercise was precisely for students to
give form to the theoretical ideas which they have learned in their course, such as stereotype formation, gender
theory, relations of power etc. The result is not only a demonstrated deeper
engagement and thought with theory but also an impressive outlet for creativity and
graphic skills.
Machinima project, 'Another Love Story' (2010),
which problematizes gender and sexual norms in a
narrative created and produced by students and distributed online as well as shown to live audiences.
Yoshikaze is an artists' studio in Second Life, run by Goodwind Seiling aka Sachiko
Hayashi with support from Humlab, Umeå University, Sweden. Its main activity is
to provide a SL residency programme for SL artists ("Up-in-the-air" Residency). The
residency is project based and can be applied to throughout the year. The artist is
expected to give at least one presentation of the project at the end of the
residency. The residency length is normally 1-3 months. The blog for the project is here and you can visit
the (virtual) space here.
Short video of the presentation by artist Garrett
Lynch following his residency at Yoshikaze.
"I am excited by [machinima] essentially because it can be personalised -
it should perhaps become like letter writing used to be - one to one in abundance -
where everyone had his or her own handwriting. Don't put it in the cinema - you
will kill it." - Peter Greenaway
Machinima - films created in game or virtual worlds - converges cinema, animation,
video games, television, puppetry, performance, music video and social virtual
worlds, among others. No other media form in history pulls off such a smorgasbord
of media in its makeup, or so defies placement in the mediascape. The challenge is
to locate machinima's hybridity, preferably (as Greenaway implores) without killing
it, in the process re-visiting our definitions and conceptions of cinema and,
indeed, the future of the moving image. Beginning with a short reel of a few
machinima films, this roundtable seminar features three speakers who will discuss
machinima as an emerging media form. Does machinima provide a new visual regime for
the digital moving image? Or might it provide new answers to what cinema is - or
will be - in its slippery dialectic between the real and the virtual?
In what may be a new genre of academic machinima, we are introduced to the
forthcoming collection of essays and interviews on machinima making, viewing and
theorizing from Continuum Press; "Understanding Machinima: Essays on Filmmaking in
Virtual Worlds" edited by Jenna Ng. The machinima explains the origins of the book
project, outlines its underlying theoretical perspectives and gives some insight into
why everyone interested in machinima should read it. As an unprecedented event in
academic publishing, the collection is augmented with an dynamic online media
collection that readers can access through QR-codes embedded in the text. While
reading about machinima the reader can go to films, images, links and written texts
that support the book chapters.
Thank you for your interest and participation. The second workshop in this series will
be on 22 February 2013, Friday, 9am – 12 noon at CRASSH,
Cambridge. In that session
we will be looking at 'The Knoweldge Economy'
and some approaches to working in it as an academic.
Name of Course: North Sami for beginners (steps 1-2) - Nordsamiska, nybörjarkurs, steg 1-2 15 HP of which about 7 HP spoken language skills - the part for which the tasks in SL were designed
Year/s and Term/s Run: Year 2009, fall term (1. pilot - only few not well planned visits in the virtual world with some of the students)
Year
2010, spring term (2. pilot - some course activities in SL were
announced on the course webpage in advance, the teacher was attending a
SL course for foreign language teachers through AVALON-project at the
same time, most of the teaching materials were produced during this
period)
Year
2010, fall term - here virtual world classes were announced in the
welcome letter and technical requirements mentioned in the course
curriculum, materials from spring term were used and improved, more
materials were created and the models were used on the Spanish beginners
course in the spring 2011. Part of a Flexutbildningar project that ended in the summer 2011 Number of Teachers: 1
RL teacher (and 2 virtual teachers of which one virtual voice morphed
teacher was used as a virtual "resource person" and the RL teacher had
her own personified teacher avatar in the virtual world, both virtual
teachers were controlled by the RL teacher), there was also one Sami
speaking guest visiting the course every now and then during the first
term
Number of Students: Varied during the course from about 14 to 7 active students.
Any Website/Online Materials:
Synopses for lesson plans and an overview of the course are available online from the AVALON site:
https://avalonlearning.pbworks.com/w/page/33867468/North%20Sami%20for%20Beginners In
the Swedish context lesson plans and all teaching materials are the
intellectual property of individual teachers. For this reason we are not prepared to share the teaching objects with any other universities without the consent of the teacher/s who created
the materials . Most of the 3D objects were objects created (and
therefore also owned) by other avatars in SL and that were given away
for free. Since the teachers mostly used free materials owned by others,
we cannot give these away to any other projects other than by sharing
in SL with actual teachers in e.g. Euroversity project. Many of the
teachers, technicians and managers who worked on the North Sami course are still involved in virtual world teaching.
We
also rented the piece of SL land from HUMlab and since the rental
contract ended in December 2011, we no longer act as "owners" of the
Språkens hus area. This was also partly the meaning of our project, that
is, to be able to teach in a virtual world without having to own any
land or to rent any space for the courses. Those teachers in the
original project team who want to use their own materials such as boards
with words now possess the skills to put up their own classrooms,
holodecks or other materials in common building areas. This was one of
the most important goals when it comes to technical skill required by
the teachers, since it was clear to the teacher team already from the
beginning, that the project was only running for 1,5 years and after
that there would not be any money left to keep up with the maintenance
of one's own teaching area or buying new materials. The pedagogical goal
was to make the teachers potential SL teachers without having to rely
on a third party.
The
idea was (and still is) to present a model for a task that can be
easily implemented in existing virtual spaces and that could be modified
to suit different languages and different language skill training. Our
models are of course most suited for training of spoken language skills,
pronunciation, and communicative and collaborative skills. We have not
used SL for teaching of written language skills, grammar or reading, not
as the primary arena. Some grammar practice has been done in SL, some
of the tasks in SL also included understanding the written task and some
visits were made in SL in order to motivate and stimulate the students
to write a descriptive text for the class. Grammar training and training
of reading in languages such as North Sami require that the teacher
import materials to SL, and therefore this area of language training has
not been in focus on the course.
“The
labours of men of genius, however erroneously directed, scarcely ever
fail in ultimately turning to the solid advantage of mankind. ”
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus.
“One
text that shows the disaster of the divorce between science and poetry
would be the one by Mary Shelley whose name is Frankenstein.”
Avital Ronell, Body/No Body (in conversation with Werner Herzog)
Frankenstein
by Mary Shelley (published 1818) represents a historical and literary
divergence between the poetic and the technical, and is a significant
reaction against this split as part of English Romanticism. It is the
contention of my presentation that in contemporary digital works of art
and narrative we are witnessing a re-marriage of science and poetry.
However, this union should be no automatic cause for romantic joy, as
the present situation in the education sector of most Western
democracies indicates. Today, the natural sciences are separated from
and weighted favorably in relation to the production and analysis of
culture. There is little to indicate that this is an effective strategy
in light of present global ‘network culture’ initiatives. Today, the
union of science and poetry in digital media is felt most acutely in
reading, or the performative interpretation of imaginative works.
Computer games, websites, digital works of literature, apps, virtual
worlds, interactive art, and spatial media (GIS, Kinnect, GPS, Wii) are
interpreted as they are performed and often require some knowledge of
the medium by the user in order for the work to function. This situation
represents a form of reading that has not been practiced widely in
Western academic and literate circles for several centuries. We are not
witnessing a return to what Walter J. Ong famously terms a “secondary
orality” (10-11), but rather we are seeing a form of inscription rapidly
emerge that is spatial, multi-temporal, performed, place-bound, visual,
sonic, and navigated. Two central concepts are important for
understanding how digital works are generally interpreted, and these are
simulation and remix. Representation has become the domain of mediating
objects, both virtual and physical, while reading is as much about
arranging and appropriating as it is about reference, symbolism,
iconography and interpretation. Based on a relatively small selection of
digital works this presentation examines reception practices involving
digital media, which suggest an expanded concept of reading where the
material technology of a work determines meaning as much as its
representative elements do. In this examination I demonstrate how
performance, participation, co-authoring, and remix make the reading of
the digital works. These works are
Patchwork Girl by Shelley Jackson (1995)
Last Meal Requested by Sachiko Hayashi (2004)
Façade By Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern (2006)
Second Life http://youtu.be/9g-kYvK3P-Q
CONSTRUCT by salevy_oh (2011)
The Celebration by Iris Piers (2011)
Patchwork Girl is a work of electronic literature by American author Shelley Jackson. It was written in Storyspace and published by Eastgate Systems in 1995. It is often discussed along with Michael Joyce's 'Afternoon, a story' as an important work of hypertext fiction.
"Shelley Jackson's brilliantly realized hypertext Patchwork Girl is an electronic fiction that manages to be at once highly original and intensely parasitic on its print predecessors."
The actions of the avatar, which is the identity of its operator in SL, conform to the traditions of Varjrayana Buddhism. The combination of the actions of the avatar and the audio is a two fold signifying structure, with the operator of the avatar at the center. In a simulative sense the operator of the avatar is enacting a practice that is firmly contextualized in religious and social contexts.
Last Meal Requested is an interactive net art work by Japanese/Swedish artist Sachiko Hayashi. It deals with themes of gender, state power, violence and the rhetoric of the image. The original work can be accessed at http://www.e-garde.net/lmr/lmr2.html
Selavy: What happens when you write in a diary? Of course, some people write down “got up at 7am, drank a coffee, had lunch with Jim, went to bed early”, but that’s not the type of diary I’m referring to. It is rather the idea of keeping a record of selected thoughts, feelings, moods, ideas, etc. The important part is, of course, that you do that regularly. And that is exactly what I did in CONSTRUCT: I added one room each day. Every one of the 75 days of the residency has its own room, often relating to the topic of the residency itself, a time capsule of ideas, artifacts, or reference to other work. If you read a diary, you may get an idea about the writer and her life. If you visit CONSTRUCT, you may get an idea about Selavy Oh and her residency.
The Celebration "combines a circular display of flatscreens, reminiscent of a giant zoetrope, containing amateur film footage from the 1910's-1940's with different soundscapes that can be manipulated by the audience" (Piers).
How the audience manipulates the various audio and images, and how they combine to create an interactive and immersive space, makes The Celebration an engaging work of interactive digital art.
The visitor enters a darkened space, where the only available light comes from the 10 screens showing the films of The Celebration. By moving around the space and judging their own distance, speed of movement, posture and height in relation to the (largely invisible) Arduino trackers, a dance begins with the audio and the cracked black and white images from almost a century ago.
Each of the screens that make up The Celebration has an Arduino tracking sensor attached, which maps the movements of the body of a visitor, and implements pre-programmed changes in the presentation of images and sound.
Unknown faces stare out from the screens, mostly laughing, talking (unheard) and often looking straight at the camera, and at the audience. As these faces watch, the visitor dodges and weaves, hops and slides, while the images and sounds change. At the same time the visitor is watching the faces, along with their bodies, their families and friends, competitors at sports events and classmates, neighbors and colleagues. It is according to this arrangement that a circuit of movement and gaze is achieved by the programming of The Celebration.
Façade is a prototype of interactive drama, a new genre of character and story-intensive interactive entertainment. Façade is freely downloadable at interactivestory.net. In Façade, you, the player, using your own name and gender, play the character of a longtime friend of Grace and Trip, an attractive and materially successful couple in their early thirties. During an evening get-together at their apartment that quickly turns ugly, you become entangled in the high-conflict dissolution of Grace and Trip’s marriage. No one is safe as the accusations fly, sides are taken and irreversible decisions are forced to be made. By the end of this intense one-act play you will have changed the course of Grace and Trip’s lives – motivating you to re-play the drama to find out how your interaction could make things turn out differently the next time.
In this video Facade is used to promote an abstinence program.
